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This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Cryptologia on 12 Feb 2018.
Abstract:
In his book ‘Noui et singolari modi di cifrare’, Giovan Battista Bellaso presents to his readers three challenge ciphertexts. Two of them are based on a polyalphabetic cipher with a mixed primary reciprocal alphabet and a long key, whereas the third one uses four independent homophonic substitution alphabets which change after each word. A successful approach to solving these ciphers, to which Bellaso gave the name ‘terzo modo’ and ‘quarto modo’, performs a simulated annealing attack directly on the primary alphabet respectively the four homophonic alphabets at once. This paper focusses on the various applied fitness functions. The solutions for the ciphertexts are given and finally discussed, with a view toward the possibility of a hidden message within the plaintexts.
The project DAAN (Design of Assistive Ambient Notification Systems, funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research) explored ambient notification as a part of an assistive computing system for elderly users. Within the framework of this project we investigated the potential of textiles as ambient notification devices, with a focus on knitted fabric. This is the documentation of the project activities at University of Arts Berlin.
e-Textile Reader
(2020)
In view of growing concerns on climate change and temperature extremes, there is a need to explore novel methods that provide thermal comfort in architecture. Latent heat thermal energy storage with phase change materials (PCM) has been widely researched in last decades in the field of energy technology and proved beneficial for reduction and shifting of the thermal loads and improving the overall thermal storage capacity of building components. Although a variety of PCM containments have been investigated for indoor cooling applications, the examples of exposed, design-oriented macro-encapsulations are rare. This paper presents a study of visible, suspended ceiling encapsulations for passive cooling, made of glass and novel bio-based PCM. The aim is to provide an overview of correlations between basic containment geometries and their thermal behavior that serves as a base for the further design of custom-made PCM macro-encapsulations. An experimental set-up of test boxes is developed for thermal cycling and a comparative analysis of the thermal performance of varied PCM encapsulation geometries. The study concludes that the containments with the large exchange surface and the small thickness offer an optimal material distribution for the temperature reduction in the box. Based on experimental results, suggestions are made on further formal strategies for the design of cooling elements for local thermal regulation.
New methods for designing with phase change materials (PCM) could widen the range of applications of passive systems for indoor cooling in architecture. This paper investigates material and formal strategies for generative architectural design that support the thermal performance of PCM. Dendritic geometry of PCM encapsulation with a large surface area per unit volume is proposed for enhancement of the heat transfer between PCM and surroundings. The prototype of the PCM ceiling component is digitally designed, manufactured in glass and tested in an experimental set-up for thermal cycling. Correlations are made between geometric configurations and cooling performance of dendritic and spherical PCM containments. The presented methodology integrates tools and techniques from digital design and energy technology, with an aim to contribute to novel PCM-based concepts for local thermal regulation in architecture.
When going deep into the area of sustainability and looking at the crosslinks that open up regarding the practice of design, a dark narrative appears whereby sustainable design is a failing practice, either aiming too high by trying to tackle global, inter- and intragenerational challenges, or aiming too low by focusing on, for example, material impacts of new products and services; this narrative appears to have an upper hand over one that is more positive and constructive that sees the strengths and potentials that design can bring to the challenges of sustainability. While the growth-oriented sustainable development discourse still dominates the way sustainable design is practiced, there are other streams with a more holistic view of sustainability. These streams are rooted in a post-growth / no-growth or strong sustainability discourse, which are slowly making their way into design practice through the guise of sufficiency, resilience and activism with a common theme of sharing knowledge, allowing citizens to be an active part of their community.
The dark narrative of sustainability in design as well as the call for designers to transform a practice of “un-sustainability” into one that allows “futuring”, leaves most of them shrugging their shoulders in light of how to implement the theoretical (utopian) requirements into their own practice. I argue for providing a different, more positive narrative, moving past the finger-pointing attitude towards reminding oneself what the practice of design in the context of sustainability can bring to the table.
Why there are new directions in sustainable design is largely because design has broadened beyond its product and service fixation towards a more process-oriented practice and an awareness of the impact designers have on this world. In these processes, designers are often taken outside the boundaries of growth-oriented economic progress towards social progress. They are continuously reminded that they cannot operate outside of a societal context and that their work has an impact on the Earth’s dynamic equilibrium (however small it might be).
Thus, the aim of my work is to re-frame sustainable design as a default configuration, stripping it from the unwieldy term of sustainability and extracting its core features of transformation, participation and future-focused thinking. Considering this core configuration, design is bound to be situated between anthropo- and eco-centricity, putting into question current user- and human-centric design approaches that tend to marginalize the everyday context and wider implications of the designed product or service.
Through an investigation that spanned the last five years, I have come to realize that sustainable design has nothing to do with a specific practice, but rather with a mindset which is, at its basis, tied to ethical considerations rooted in everyday life. It is moreover tied to broad, interdisciplinary knowledge that is needed to grasp the interconnected and global challenges that lie ahead. To make this point, in my work I am retracing the steps from the early roots of sustainable design within the sustainability movement towards its radical opening in different directions such as design activism, transformation design, design for social innovation and participatory design.
Furthermore, I propose a re-framing of the practice of sustainable design, (tentatively) linking it with a research-through-design approach and subsequently, through the design case, constructing a dynamic, interdisciplinary action repertoire for designers.
When framing this renewed idea of sustainable design, not only do the two dimensions of transformation and participation almost automatically appear in the current discourse, but also the notion of opening up contexts through design in a way that is directed towards possible (sustainable) futures becomes apparent. Several overarching perspectives resurface in the course of this work:
1 Opening – How can designers open access to contexts, tools, knowledge and technology through collaborative, interdisciplinary action?
2 Making – How can designers provide processes to involve stakeholders in critically assessing and making possible futures?
3 Transforming – How can designers transform contexts and situations from one state to a preferred one (and how can they facilitate the negotiation-processes tied to them with regards to social equity and intra-generational justice)?
The topic of transformation and future-focused thinking is currently engaging most of design, not exclusively sustainable design, and this thinking seems to provide an underlying idea that design may be able to provide at least part of the skill-set required to cater to this transformation. It is, however, not only the context and situations design claims to transform, but also user behavior and market incentives. In this research, transformation is viewed as a careful byline to a project which spans almost six years and is now coming to a close.
The design case for this research is the project Neighborhood Labs which has been run by an interdisciplinary group of design researchers, citizens and other stakeholders in a central, but isolated area in Berlin’s Mitte district. It incorporated the development of a research concept and experimentation process which builds on a participatory design methodology as well as a living lab approach. It was planned open-ended with the potential of stakeholders taking over after the official end of the research project.
In terms of sustainability, the subject and guiding theme of sharing and collaboration was the baseline of the design phases and iterations. While focusing at first on the sharing of concrete objects in a specific community of practice, there was a shift to sharing knowledge, as well as to the empowerment of citizens to impact local decision-making processes, a much fuzzier subject than the sharing of objects or services. The project was run in three intertwined phases:
– Sharing phase / Neighborhood lab: Setting up and running a living lab. Investigating the context and building the infrastructure. Approaching the neighborhood and designing tools for gathering insights about needs and issues within it while drawing active citizens towards the project. After this step, insights inform the research process and help focus the research question further. This phase produced several concepts and sketch prototypes in collaboration with the stakeholders of the Fischerinsel, Berlin.
– Infrastructure phase / Designing infrastructures & fostering change: Designing and testing participatory tools such as the Hybrid Letterbox, an analog-digital bridge device, in order to discuss and evaluate questions of social cohesion and communication within the neighborhood and to activate citizens for involvement in these issues.
– Transfer phase / Design transfer: opening up the context and pushing the methods and tools outside of its initial project and creating new instances thereof.
As I am reflecting on the process of a long-term project now behind me, such as working through trial-and-error phases, prototypical research-through-design attempts and the immersion in the Fischerinsel-context that the research group grew a part of, several key directions in the dealing with and conveying of sustainability challenges appear.
On a practical level, these directions materialize in the categories of investigative action, participatory tools and workshop formats, which are distilled from a broad range of interdisciplinary actions conducted over the course of the research, leading to an action repertoire for transformation which I propose as one of the outcomes of my work.
On a theoretical level, I argue for sustainable design by default, meaning sustainability as an inherent, embedded goal of any design process, integrating a research-through-design mindset in sustainable design or vice versa. In further steps, this entails restructuring the way we teach design and how design practice is informed throughout its process.
Elastic gridshells are celebrated for their striking biomimetic curves, long spans and efficient material usage. Constructed from a grid mechanism of slender beams, an elastic gridshell is assembled on a flat surface then repositioned into its final curved shape after which stabilising elements are added and the structure becomes a stiff load-bearing shell.
While elastic gridshells are efficient in their built-state, the established methods with which to erect them (‘lift up’, ‘push up’ and ‘ease down’) are associated with substantial complexity, cost and time which inhibit their adoption. The central research question of this thesis asks whether elastic gridshells can be erected by means of pneumatic falsework (i.e. ‘inflate’), if so how and what would be the implications of doing so.
The work presented in this thesis proves that the pneumatic erection of elastic gridshells is not only feasible but can offer many advantages (such as speed of erection, structural robustness and architectural qualities) over existing shelters for humanitarian, event and architectural applications. A literature review is presented on the historical precedent for this novel method. The computational challenges of simulating the complex erection process are investigated in depth leading to the development of bespoke simulation methods based on the novel application of a projection-based dynamic relaxation solver.
Case studies and a benchmark compare state-of-the-art finite element solvers based on both global and local stiffness revealing their quantitative and qualitative differences giving some indication as to the future of finite element modelling for the built environment in engineering, research and education. Innovative prototypes of augmented and virtual reality engineering tools for education are presented as wider reaching applications of the novel simulation method developed for this thesis.
The simulation methods developed to answer the central research question deliver valuable findings relating to the scope of feasibility and the practical execution of the novel method including: suitable shapes and sizes of shells, ‘trigger’ pressures required, the function and importance of tethering cables during erection, development and detailed analysis of erection sequences and identification of material suitability and performance criteria. One small and two full-scale physical prototypes were built which validate the novel computational methods to a high level of precision, offer practical detailing solutions and demonstrate the architectural and humanitarian potential within the pneumatic erection of elastic gridshells.
This dissertation offers a critical engagement with design’s implication in the ontological constitution of gendered, racialized, subjugated bodies. To do so, it starts from a broad understanding of design as an activity that articulates modes of being in the world — and that, in so doing, also shapes itself. This approach is grounded on an interrogation of the political motives that permeate and inform design processes; I take particular interest in how these have been manifested throughout the history of birth control technology.
Starting from this background, I outline and propose the concept of technoecologies of birth control — that is, spaces that emerge through the performances of co-constitutive material-semiotic actors, for the purposes of birth control. Throughout this dissertation, I identify two fundamental sets of actors operating within the technoecological space: bodies and things. The co-constitution of these actors is realized across historically, geopolitically, socioculturally, technoscientifically located performances; as such, technoecological actors are approached as relational, contextual and mutually structuring entities.
This conceptualization of technoecologies of birth control is informed by feminist and decolonial theories, and posits that these spaces are crucial for the establishment and sedimentation of biopolitical regimes of domination. Design is thoroughly implicated in the emergence of technoecologies of birth control, as it holds a crucial role in the management and regulation of bodies characteristic of biopolitical regimes of domination. In other words, design inscribes ontological meaning onto some bodies in detriment of others; it is with the sedimentation of these conditions that bodies become coded as ‘naturally’ or ‘fundamentally’ different. The constitution of difference amongst material-semiotic actors in technoecologies of birth control is thus articulated by design; in other words, it is the result of a planned, deliberate inscription of ontological meaning.
My interrogation of design’s role in the constitution of subjugated bodies occurs within the scope of these technoecologies. Starting from this framework, I discuss the insights offered by a series of experiments (‘Yarn Sessions’ and 'Oniria') conceived as both explorations of the technoecological space, and speculations on the instability of the social constitution of bodies by design. My theorization of technoecologies of birth control happens, thus, through a process of research through design — that is, a process in which theory and practice are deployed as mutually informing forces in design research. Through the analysis of these design experiments, I propose three fundamental aspects of the performances of material-semiotic actors within technoecologies of birth control: relativity, opacity, and duplicity.
The Central Library of the universities TU Berlin and the UdK Berlin turned ten years old in 2014 and its wayfinding system hasn’t been updated or redesigned since. Actually, it wasn’t planned as a system. This orientation system has been developed spontaneously in different methods since the beginning. The staff that works in the library developed it based on their daily necessities. There was no main objective, so it grew in an organic form. Because of this, the current system presents problems that decrease its performance and effectiveness.
For this project I would like to focus of the current wayfinding system of this library and its users in addition to a posterior redesign proposal.
Decolonizing the Earview of Design: Listening Anxieties and the Apparatus of Auditory Governance
(2018)
This dissertation attends to the intersection of sound, material culture, racism, and police violence in Brazil from a decolonizing perspective. With a focus on theories informed by cultural and sound studies, it unravels the contingent arrangements through which certain designed objects and practices function as material-discursive nodes for the normalization and perpetuation of racialized violences. To explore these ideas, it reads design—a field of knowledge and a set of practices—as a material-discursive apparatus, accountable for not only the results but also the conditions of possibility for any research endeavor.
The main driving force of this work is the identification and evincing of ‘listening anxieties.’ These emerge through enactments of political consensus, policing, and compliance; the articulation of these three in institutional, designerly, as well as everyday practices is what this research identifies as the Apparatus of Auditory Governance (or AAG). More specifically, I look at three manifestations of these auditory governances in contemporary Brazil—from the early 2000s to the judiciary Coup d’Etat of late 2016. These range from the criminalization of jukeboxes by a Military Police acting outside the scope of written law in so-called ‘pacified’ neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro, to the construction of a seven kilometer-long acoustic barrier in the city as a device for urban segregation, to the deployment of sound bombs as devices for the enforcement of silence by the same police force in São Paulo.
The articulation of auditory governances, however, is not fixed; rather, it shifts and mutates to account for distinct and diverse experiences of listening. These shifts are what this work calls earviews: a conceptual orientation which determines the “listening point” where narratives and perceptions of auditory reality unfold from. The AAG, articulated and deconstructed at the intersection of distinct and conflicting earviews, forms the main method of this dissertation, and is of particular interest for sound and design studies. By understanding the earview as an asset of and for designing, it is possible to interrogate the role of design in the enforcement, reproduction, and normalization of sonic violences, and the erasure of other(ed) narratives of listening. Rather than simply evincing the hegemony of normative—qua racialized—earviews, I intervene by reading them through first-person accounts and storytelling stemming from fieldwork with artists and activists in Brazil, as well as from two movies by Brazilian directors—O Som ao Redor (2012) and Branco Sai, Preto Fica (2014). These intersections are further complemented by a semi-fictional narrative created throughout five collective pedagogical sessions fusing designing and fabulation. This format, named “Yarn Sessions,” is my methodological proposition for design research in this work.
This research started out by posing three broad questions relating to the connection between auditory practices—i.e. sounds and their social, cultural, and political engagements—and the design of listening devices. It asked: what is the contribution of design to the politics of mediated listening and its devices? What might be the possible, probable and/or preferable enactments of the political agency of designed listening devices? These initial questions are all addressed by this work, and have shifted from their initial form as a general investigation on the entanglement of design and listening, to offer an inquiry and an intervention on violences enacted with and through sound.
This work thus participates in a re-historicization of the colonial underpinnings of design, while at the same time offering a decolonizing methodological proposition for design research and design studies with a sound and listening-oriented locus. It demonstrates that the material conditions of sonic violence—from architectural planning to transitional/illegalized sound objects to the development of weaponry—are a form of ontological design (cf. Anne-Marie Willis) which succeeds by making its own colonial and racialized ethos discursively and materially invisible. This ontological enunciation demands the accountability of the designer as both producer and reproducer of racialized/colonial phenomena in the making of their own practices.
Yet this research does not align itself completely with discourses from the “ontological turn” or “new materialisms” in philosophy (cf. Karen Barad), insofar as these often undermine and erase the role played by coloniality and “racialized assemblages” (cf. Alexander Weheliye) to the constitution of its own ontologies and epistemologies. My proposition for design understands the field to constitute in itself an ontoepistemology (cf. Willis, Gloria Anzaldúa), albeit reading such ontological alignments through decolonial and critical race studies. In so doing, it opens up a new field of inquiry in which sound studies and decolonial thought inform designerly inquiries into material culture not only for the evincing of specific material-discursive phenomena (e.g. sonic violences), but also for intervening on them with intersectional and decolonizing frameworks.
Introduction
Following their first meeting in Düsseldorf in 1961, Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik began their lifelong series of artistic collaborations so-called EURASIA. Sharing a common interest in Europe and Asia, they started to consider Europe (=West) and Asia (=East) as one continental culture, and tried to connect them as EURASIA.
Containing Europe and Asia, Eurasia is one continuous mass of land. Europe and Asia, or West and East are merely imaginary divisions, but once they are named Europe and Asia or West and East, this fixed division makes it difficult to understand that these two areas are in fact one continent with common roots, and that they developed through mutual influence. To realize the continuity of Europe and Asia and understand how to connect these two regions is becoming an urgent question.
In our globalized world, it is becoming impossible to uphold protection through the entity of the nation-state, which defines the enemy as being outside the nation. In order to find an alternative to the nation-state, we need to look back in history and restructure the world on a more abstract level; in other words, the sublation of Westphalian sovereignty which developed after the Thirty Years’ War is now required.
Also if Asia becomes one political entity, just as Europe is becoming one political entity, the tension between Europe and Asia will be intense; it will be no different from that between nations, which caused two World Wars. As Asia, a large part of which was once colonized by Europe, begins to gain political and economical power, it becomes necessary to prepare a plan to reconcile Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, if Eurasia is united as an expansion of the nation-state, the result may be regional hegemony with a one-sided national perspective, similar to that of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere led by the Empire of Japan. The Eurasian Economic Union led by Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation threatens to make the same mistake. Bearing in mind the fact that the bloc economy triggered World War II, to connect Europe and Asia while eschewing regional hegemony will be crucial for our co-existence in the 21st century.
Having endured World War II, both Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik were aware of the contradictions of modernity and the nation-state which originated in Europe. They reflected on how to overcome divisions such as those between nations, between Europe and Asia in colonial history, and between East and West during the Cold War at that time. Eliminating borders, Beuys and Paik’s utopian vision of EURASIA is an abstract and archetypical metaphor for connecting Europe and Asia, West and East, or two opposite things into one, and it will give us a hint on how to overcome the divisions caused by modernity.
Als Ergebnis der internationalen Tagung „Artistic Needs and Institutional Desires“ im November 2015 im Haus der Kulturen der Welt erscheint nun eine überarbeitete Version des Arbeitspapiers zur Veranstaltung.
Der erste Teil der Publikation beherbergt eine Zusammenfassung der geführten Diskussionen und ihrer Ergebnisse, die in den vier Arbeitsgruppen, die sich zu der Tagung in Berlin zusammenfanden, erarbeitet wurden. Im zweiten Teil folgt das vollständige Arbeitspapier, das vor Beginn der Tagung an alle Teilnehmer ausgehändigt wurde, inklusive kleiner Einführungen in die beteiligten Programme sowie thematischer Vorlagen für die vier Arbeitsgruppen.
Die Publikation ist eine in der Form einzigartige Zusammenfassung künstlerischer Drittzyklus-Programme und dokumentiert die vielschichtigen Diskussionen und Reflektionen, die die Begegnung im Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin hervorgerufen hat.
This thesis investigates and describes the design and structural behaviour of elastic gridshells. Elastic gridshells are shell structures composed of a single- or multi-layer grid of continuous profiles, which are initially straight and will be progressively bent until achieving an architecturally and structurally satisfactory geometry. Usually used as medium to large span surface structures, elastic gridshells present a wide variety in their surface geometry, grid configuration and materiality. One important structural criterion of elastic gridshells is the high residual stress to which they are subjected after the bending process. Using materials with high limit strain, the residual utilisation rate can be reduced. In the first part of the work, the structural aspects to be considered on the design procedure of elastic gridshells are described and identified on existing design approaches. Then, the mechanical properties of available materials, suitable for elastic gridshells, have been compared and application examples have been presented and illustrated.
Elastic gridshells offer significant cost and time advantages during the production, transport and construction processes. Nevertheless, the shaping of the initially flat grid also generates important bending stresses on the structures, reducing therewith their bearing capacity against external loads. In order to diminish the initial stresses, profiles with low sections and materials with low modulus of elasticity are usually chosen. However, this leads to a reduction of the global stiffness of the gridshell which can result in stability problems. With an optimisation of the grid pattern - orientation and arrangement of the grid profiles - a minimisation of the profiles’ curvature can be obtained and the load-bearing capacity of the gridshells improved. In the second part of the thesis, an optimisation method based on variational principles for regular and irregular gridshells is proposed and different case studies presented. The aim of using variational principles is to establish extremal functions which minimize the value of quantities related to particular grid properties. These properties are: the curvature of the profiles, the distance to a target surface geometry and the deviation of the edge lengths from a desired mesh size. The advantage of this method is that weighting factors can be applied to the grid parameters to be minimised, so that a variety of grid configurations can be established responding to different specific requirements.
The bending process and load-bearing behaviour of elastic gridshells can be analysed using three-dimensional finite element models. During the shaping of the profiles, internal forces are induced on the structure, so that the final equilibrium shape of the gridshell will be attained once its edges have been fixed, the bracing elements have been assembled and the external shaping forces have been removed. The goal of the numerical analysis is to quantitatively evaluate the geometry and material stresses resulting from the shaping process and the load-bearing capacity of the gridshell under external loading. In the third part of the thesis, the influence of the orientation and arrangement of the grid profiles on the residual stresses after erection process and on the distribution of forces and deformability of the gridshell under external loading are analysed on three regular anticlastic gridshells with varying grid pattern. Moreover, the potential and limitations of using tensile membranes as restraining and at the same time covering element of elastic gridshells are studied on a hemispheric regular elastic gridshell.
Numerical techniques are commonly used for the calculation of stress distributions and displacements of complex indeterminate bearing structures. Nevertheless, to model the elements they are composed of and the connection properties between them, simplifications and approximations are done. The purpose of the fourth and last part of the work is to analyse the influence of these simplifications on the results of the simulation and thereby recalibrate and benchmark the numerical models with physical prototypes. Two gridshells composed of GFRP profiles have been built: an irregular hemisphere of 10 m diameter, braced with a third layer of profiles, and a regular hemisphere of 5 m diameter, restraint with a tensile membrane. The prototypes have been loaded symmetrically and asymmetrically applying point loads at the grid nodes and the resulting nodal displacements have been compared to those calculated with the numerical models.
My doctoral thesis with the title „Rebuilt Rubble - Community Gardens in the South Bronx from 1970s to the 21st century: Common land use in the inner city from a socio-economic open space planning perspective” is focused on the assumption that people are longing for and are committed to a common urban open space land use form in the inner city – a hypothesis that I investigated by analyzing the development of community gardens in the study area South Bronx from the 1970s to the 21st century.
My thesis is contextualized in the research fields of social open space planning and urban design. The analysis is based on qualitative data collection that encompasses census data, plans, open interviews and participatory observation and includes the discussion of secondary literature regarding community gardens and urban open space development in the South Bronx.
Since the urbanization and industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century residential space in densely build-up inner cities, and especially in low-income neighborhoods, has been reduced often to a minimum, and privately usable open space is absent in many cases. Starting with the global economic recession of the 1970s in the urban centers of North American cities such as New York City there have been privately, but collectively used gardens created on public open land. These so called community gardens were started by low-income residents on vacant property lots in the vicinity of their apartments in order to improve their quality of life and in answer to the “neglect” of their neighborhoods by the government and municipality. Today there are about 600 community gardens in the metropolitan area of New York City and 44 gardens alone in the area called South Bronx, the study area of my thesis.
I analyze in my thesis the development of this common land use in the study area South Bronx from a social-economic and open planning perspective. The case study of my research is focused on community gardening and the “casita”, the small hut that low-income residents with Latin American and Caribbean cultural background build themselves out of found and recycled materials in many community gardens in the South Bronx.
My thesis researches the development of community gardens in the South Bronx since the 1970s influenced by often conflicting interests of various land use groups, residents and city planning agendas until today. It is a document of the humans’ need for common urban open space land use and of their commitment to the community garden land use form in the inner city.
Encountering the Digital: Representational and Experiential Embodiment in Tangible User Interfaces
(2014)
This dissertation is concerned with the concept of »embodiment« in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). It investigates the issue by the means of Research Through Design
(RTD).
The notion of »embodiment« has many meanings in HCI. It is therefore the aim of this work to contribute to its clarification. I propose a distinction between two major meanings: »embodiment« in the sense of »representation« and »embodiment« in the sense of how the experience of one’s socio-physical world is fundamentally grounded in having a living body. I propose to name these two meanings »representational embodiment« and »experiential embodiment«.
Having separated the two meanings, I then look at those moments in which they encounter: I investigate moments in which »embodied« users face »embodiments« of digital information. These moments of encounter appear to be a central aspect of Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs), which are often concerned with making digital information graspable. Therefore, I focus on TUIs, pursuing the question of how the design of the »representational embodiments« of digital information affects the user’s experience of the interaction.
RTD is a research concept that promises to offer a new, »designerly« perspective on a subject matter. There are different approaches to RTD, of which I have chosen Findeli’s model of Project-Grounded Research (PGR). I introduce RTD and PGR, contextualising them in their historical context. I underline the central roles of the prototype and the »project« in PGR. I also relate RTD to its academic reference points: action research and grounded theory. Afterwards, I transform my research question into a design question, namely how the »embodiments« of digital information could be designed in a way that is oriented to the users’ »embodiment«.
In everyday language, physical (e. g. »disk size«, »data mining«) and social metaphors (»smart phone«, »battery life«) are often used to describe concepts of interacting with digital information. These metaphors form the starting point of my investigation into TUIs that make digital information graspable through socio-physical manifestations – through shape change, weight shift, and life-like signals. I describe the prototypes and report several previous studies that were conducted with them. These assess, for example, the accuracy at which users could feel the shifted weight on the phone’s inside, or the experiences of users carrying the »living mobile« for a weekend.
I then report a comparative study of the three prototypes and three vibration-based comparison prototypes. In this study, I make use of the Repertory Grid Technique (RGT). RGT is based on so-called »personal constructs«, which the users name themselves, as to describe the prototypes (e. g. »knowledge required – easy to understand«, »biological – technical«, »exciting – boring«). The users then use their own personal constructs to rate the prototypes. The findings of the RGT study indicate that the interaction with the Shape-Changing Mobile, Weight-Shifting Mobile, and Ambient Life prototypes was experienced by the users as novel and interesting, but at times also as irritating, and even annoying. The mixed results from this study can be described as three »two-sided coins«: the interaction with the prototypes was rated as rich in associations, but requiring prior knowledge and, at times, disappointing. It was rated as permanent, but at times annoying. Lastly, it was described as cute, but sometimes creepy.
I conclude that the encounter of »representational embodiment« and »experiential embodiment« can open a conceptual space for interaction design that is rich in opportunities, but also rich in challenges. It is this space that I set out to explore with this dissertation.
In summary, the main contributions of this dissertation are a separation of different meanings of »embodiment« in HCI and a study of TUI prototypes that explore the encounter of these meanings.